Stef Smits is a senior programme officer and Co-director of IRC's Growth Hub. He has 20 years of professional experience in water supply and sanitation in over 25 countries in Europe, Latin America, Southern Africa, and South Asia. His main thematic expertise includes: institutional models for water supply, sustainability and enabling environment, monitoring, costing and financing of services and integrated water resources management.
Stef has led numerous projects on these topics, and published about them. In addition, he has ample management expertise: from consultancy assignments to multi-annual programmes, and units within an organisation. He has worked for a range of clients including bilateral donors, development banks, research funders and NGOs. Stef holds an MSc degree in Irrigation and Water Engineering from Wageningen University, The Netherlands.
Sangeeta Ramola is the former Pradhan (president) of the Gawana Gram Panchayat (local government), in the State of Uttarakhand, India. Her work and effort shows the importance of local political leaders in achieving access to rural water supply that lasts. Read more...
Communal wealth is one of the most important factors affecting rural water services, and household connections are the only technology which can... Read more...
This "how to" note provides practical guidance on how to analyse value for money (VFM) in Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH) programmes. It shows... Read more...
For Ghana the main recommendations were to revisit the Service Delivery Approach (SDA) , introduce more robust monitoring, increase sector funding... Read more...
This paper describes how the ASTRA tool can help identify potentially appropriate technical solutions fro the delivery of arsenic and saline-free... Read more...
What is the best technical solution to deal with arsenic-polluted and saline water in Bangladesh? When is it better to treat the water or to choose... Read more...
Triple-S has successfully promoted sustainability and the Service Delivery Approach (SDA) at the international level and in target countries. The... Read more...
The domain of inquiry of this review is the rural water sector in low- and middle-income countries. Read more...
A state of the art of strengthening monitoring water supply and sanitation in developing countries. Google scholar Read more...
An introduction to ten building blocks to support sustainable service delivery. Read more...
Sustainable groundwater use is more likely in Indian villages if farmers, other village community members and NGOs work together with researchers and... Read more...
Last week it was World Water Day 2014 , with the topic of "water and energy". I see obvious issues coming by on the water-energy nexus (which by the way is one of those development sector buzz words that I start disliking more every day. I hope the next buzz word is a bit more, uh, sparkling), such... Read more...
Territorial approaches to rural water supply were a hot topic at this week's Triple-S annual meeting. Read more...
Email requests can sometimes trigger the most interesting thoughts and ideas. Read more...
It would be easy, and wrong, to say that global conferences rarely deliver results, for sometimes they offer brand new ways of seeing things. Read more...
IRC and the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) have been supporting El Salvador, Honduras and Paraguay to develop and implement rural water monitoring systems. Read more...